Hoes

Description

This drawing is from a collection of watercolor sketches created in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic during the 1920s–1940s. The Yakut ASSR—informally referred to as Yakutiya and known today as the Sakha Republic—covered a large region in eastern Siberia. It is the historical home of the Yakut (Sakha) people, a Turkic ethnic group who arrived in the region around the 13th century and who still make up almost half of its population. This collection of sketches was created by Mikhail Mikhailovich Nosov (1887–1960), who was born near Yakutsk and spent his early adulthood working as a teacher. Nosov began working as an artist and specialist of local history during the 1920s, while simultaneously continuing to teach until he began working at the Yakutsk Local History Museum in 1934. He made drawings based on archaeological finds in the region and later worked at the institute of Yakut language, literature, and history in the Siberian Branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he wrote a five-volume atlas about Yakut material culture. This collection of Nosov’s drawings depicts Yakut material culture of the 18th and 19th centuries. Featured items include women’s jewelry, hats, clothing, traps, barns, and farming equipment. The interiors of Yakut dwellings are also depicted. Nosov’s drawings and paintings are housed in the Yakutsk State Museum of the History and Culture of Northern Peoples. The collection was digitized for the Meeting of Frontiers digital library project in the early 2000s.